Online self-presentations of migrant women in Norway

Social networking sites (SNS) represent important social arenas in young people’s everyday life. SNS give young people with migrant backgrounds opportunities to keep in touch with family and friends in transnational networks and create opportunities to establish “digital neighborhoods” of youth in Norway and elsewhere. Activities on SNS, however, also involve risk in relation to visibility and exposure and may reproduce and even reinforce processes of marginalization.

In this seminar, Ingrid Onarheim Spjeldnæs and Rita Agdal will present research findings where they group-interviewed 15 young women aged 16 to 26 years who have lived in Norway for several years and originate from the Greater Middle East or from the Horn of Africa.

Their analysis suggests that these young women present themselves in carefully tailored ways according to affordances of SNS, such as anonymity, visibility, and persistence. Self-presentations are managed towards several particular, yet large and diverse audiences, bearing in mind the constant risks of experiencing challenges, such as “context collapse.” Their analysis draws upon research from communication researcher Hollenbaugh (2021) as well as a broader framework of social psychology and symbolic interactionism.

Spjeldnæs and Agdal’s presentation will also touch upon the topic of settings-based health promotion strategies that aim to enable people to increase control over their health and environments. In this case it implies sharing strategies to navigate complex networks, like emphasizing the importance of anonymous chats, sharing health-related information with extended networks with lower e-literacy, and the cocreation of health promotion strategies.